Super Sad True Love Story eBook Review

I have decided that I am old based on the fact that when I am taking my walk with a cane, I prefer to listen to the New York Times Book Review Podcast than music. What always surprises is me about the podcast is that people have such intelligent and interesting and insightful comments about the books they read. I thought that in addition to being old, I might just be dumb and inarticulate because I never feel like I have a lot to postulate about the books I read other than euh, I liked it or great read! That is until I read Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart.

I'm going to start by saying that the thesis of this book is stated quite clearly on the last page and that I bookmarked it on my nook so that I could put it in this review, but I lollygagged so long writing it that the book expired and I no longer have access to the thesis. I for one, was glad for the simply stated thesis because I had begun to think that I was too dumb for this book. It takes place in a post-modern world where the USA doesn't really exist. The financial world is collapsed and dollars have to be yuan pegged or they are valueless. The ruling party is the "Bipartisans" who aren't really bipartisans and everyone has an äppärät that streams all of their information including credit ratings and fuckability ratings. Instead of talking people 'verbal' each other. Everyone communicates through GlobalTeens (which I never figured out if it was just for teens or not.) Women walk around in 'onionskin' jeans that show everything and I mean everything. They shop at ridiculous named stores like AssJourney . They are nothing more than their fuckability rating and transparent outwear. There are HNWI and LNWI (high and low net worth individuals.) What's left of the USA is in a collapse and towards the end of the novel there's a revolution and the loosely termed "country" is left in an even more dire strait. Enter Lenny Abramov, a forty year old, messy, incoherent, wants to do good Russian Jew, quasi- loser with a very low fuckability rating who works for the Post-Humantity Services where you can go through dechronification processes to live forever. On a trip to Italy he meets and falls in love with Eunice Park a young, Korean American who is not so much in love with Lenny, but who returns to New York City to live with him because she doesn't really have any other place to live.

Yeah, you could think the Super Sad True Love Story is that of Lenny and Eunice, but here's a hint, it's not. This book's really a gimick book. The gimick is reading about this future where there are fuckability ratings, dechronification processes and Lenny is degraded for owning (gasp!) books. And after I got over the shock factor, I didn't care. It was Lenny and Eunice whining and not liking each other and reading stupid letters from Eunice to her friends. If there wasn't so much sex and bad language this book could replace 1984 as required reading in high schools. Oooh I'm scared. Oooh a warning. This book could easily make a 10 page essay for English class. It took me three books to read it because I kept putting it down thinking, geez I'm dumb because I just feel that I'm not smart enough to get the whole point of this book, plus I'm not interested; which is why I'm so very thankful that the author wrote his thesis statement on the last page of the book.